Quality thread. Don’t know where to begin, return for more drone heavy intersections and ambient, plus guitar based tones (Jerry Donahue‘s on Gypsy Davy specifically, Garcia, haters beware) and the odd folk tune.
When I was about 11, chanced upon Nosferatu by Herzog one night on the telly, so although Popol Vuh and Danse Macabre strangeness was one thing, the prelude to Das Rheingold was the deepest, most immersive listening experience I’d ever had. Big music family, lot of music played at home and it was this experience that changed me permanently. There was an instrumental version on Yt that‘s disappeared that gets the first transition down heavenly due to lack of jolting voice.
Few years later my Dad put this on one evening
The combination of harmonic ranges and the rhythm section shifted something temporally in my teenage bonce. It was a journey within 10,000 fathoms of sound, where you disintegrate and descend completely out of time. Ancient, yet contemporary. Spatial, but in relation to consciousness itself. I was there in a room but transported somewhere completely beyond language by those horns, out of space-time itself. I’m hacking away at attempting to describe transcendence here, transcendent music the likes of which a 13 year old rarely experiences or even fully understands when it appears. Maybe it was maturity, a developing mind finding the right tune at the right moment, figuring out its structure and chords (bass player fail), but could I play along to it? Could I fuck.
About a year later at a mate’s house, his older brother barged in with a new 12” and dropped this onto their record player. The known universe changed forever
Nottingham and Sheffield are close geographically and CV already had a following at school, but because of football rivalries and the more dirgeful synth pop atrocities coming out of Yorkshire, it took a while for them to sink in. Micro-Phonies was a bit esoteric for our ears previously, then this tune appeared. So, just as Don Cherry opened up new worlds with Degi Degi, Sensoria did something similar with drum programming, ultra hypnotic percussion and their signature vocal manipulation. It had a groove that was quantifiably the future. And it was just up the M1. The irony. And that squelchy bass lick. Which leads to....
Good ol’ House. There are hundreds of quality tracks that came before these, too many to list, but what happens when you cross Chez Damien and Ron Trent? Morning Factory and Space Riddims. They form a bridge across classic NY+NJ and i don’t want to say this and come the cunt but tropes, with the best music of this nature that‘s been made since. They also work best where they should, through a decent live system out under the stars with (perhaps) a mushroom brew. That’s the deepest musical experience of my life, overall. Hours in that space where 4x4 is really 1x1. Basic separation for tops, mids and bins, give the music as much clarity and punch as possible and to let it breathe. I miss it.